Film Deets:
Director: Branden Kramer
Screenplay: Branden Kramer
Actresses: Ashley Benson, Kalli Vernoff
Category: Stalking
Themes: Surveillance, Silence
Why do these screams matter?
Released in 2015, Branden Kramer’s Ratter explores the horror of stalking when it takes on the added dimension of disembodiment via the use of personal technology. The film follows Emma (Ashley Benson), a college student watched through spyware added to her personal devices by an unknown person. Notable for its distinct lack of screams, an anomaly in the genre, Ratter leverages escalating dread to underscore that violence against women is not always overt and outwardly violent. Sometimes, it is stealthy and insidious.
In the film’s only scream sequence, Emma is on a phone call with her mother (Kalli Vernoff) when the person who has been stalking her attacks her from behind.
Ratter is a film very much predicated upon silence. Whether it is the police, her friends, or her family, Emma’s concerns are minimized and/or dismissed at virtually every turn. This lack of institutional response and support offered to Emma reminds the audience that safeguards are not foolproof, especially when they have not kept pace with developing technology. The Bureau of Justice reports that 1.8 million persons have experienced traditional stalking and stalking with technology simultaneously, with women stalked twice as much as men (Trauman & Morgan). And Pew Research Center, in its report on online harassment, found that young women ages 18-24 were the most likely demographic to experience online stalking (Duggan). Evidence also suggests that these numbers could be even greater due to increasing personal technology usage. For example, research has found that the prevalence of location tracking, the inability to identify spyware apps, and the popularity of jailbreaking devices (meaning bypassing security features of a phone to allow for more customization) have all contributed to personal device usage norms that put people at risk (Gallardo, et al.) It is this technological landscape that Ratter mines for its horror.
The stalking threat in Ratter is both embodied and disembodied in ways that make the audience’s sense of impending danger tangible and suffocating. Because we don’t know who the stalker is, our sense of paranoia and suspicion of the people Emma encounters grows in parallel with hers. Like Emma, we understand that having passwords hacked or photos disappearing from the Cloud can have reasonable explanations and so her propensity to dismiss the threats initially rings true. But as the frequency of jarring events occurs, it becomes harder to dismiss the acts as coincidental. Emma’s escalating fear reads as believable largely due to the reactions of those around her. Her concerns are routinely dismissed by family and friends and not having those closest to her not take the threats seriously sends a dangerous signal to Emma that she’s being unreasonable in her fears. Ultimately, it is her internalization of that messaging that puts her at even greater risk. While the audience knows that the stalking has escalated, Emma does not. And the revelation that the stalking has moved from the cyber realm to in-person via shots of the stalker entering and leaving Emma’s apartment reframes for the audience the level of danger Emma faces and moves her lack of action from understandable to frustrating.
The oppressive silence framing Emma’s experience as a stalking victim is ultimately disrupted in the film’s final minutes when the stalker enters her home and attacks her. The screams Emma releases are certainly ones of fear at the awareness that the threat she has been living with has finally materialized in physical form. But they are also an indictment of the many and varied ways women’s fear is often rendered invisible. Because the scene is unlit, all the audience experiences at this moment are Emma’s screams of terror coupled with her mother’s screams of anguish. Periodic sounds of duct tape ripping and moving shadows suggest an extremely violent encounter and is a pointed reversal of the surveillance of Emma’s every waking moment that led up to this moment. Unlike the surveillance footage of Emma that is only of interest to the perpetrator because it makes Emma visible during her unguarded moments, this scene jolts the audience into an awareness that we, too, have been adopting the POV of the stalker and that our discomfort at suddenly having Emma’s anguish rendered invisible is a direct result of that association.
The narrative beats of this scene are wholly built upon ideas of invisibility. As the scene opens, Emma is video chatting with her mother after finally returning to her apartment having fled in fear earlier in the day. Her mother’s admonition that she needs to find a new apartment with a doorman indicates that she is finally starting to see that there is a real issue that needs to be addressed, but her failure to insist that her daughter not be alone shows that she still imagines any threat as removed. Even when the lights go out, and Emma’s fear is overtly mounting, her mother admonishes her to calm down. It is only once Emma starts screaming in earnest, and sounds indicate she is not alone and is in a violent struggle, that her mother reacts.
The physical violence Emma endures at the hands of her stalker in this moment is invisible, much like the mental and emotional violence that preceded it, and the film dares to ask viewers why the former might inspire action from observers when the latter did not. Her mother’s screams, which continue after Emma’s screams have ceased, echo the same paralytic despair that Emma felt throughout the film and are a recognition of having failed her daughter in dismissing her fears as paranoia. The return to silence that rounds out this scene is devastating for both what it implies about Emma’s fate and for what it suggests about the value we place (or don’t) on women’s experiences.
Works Cited
Duggan, Maeve. “Online Harassment.” Pew Center Research, 22 Oct. 2014.
Gallardo, Andy, Hanseul Kim, Kevin Kim, Chanaradee Leelamanthep, and Tianying Li. “Mobile Security Strategies and Usability Problems in IPV and Stalking Contexts.” USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2021, 8 Aug 2021, Virtual.
Trauman, J. L., and Rachel E. Morgan. “Stalking Victimization, 2016.” United States Department of Justice, 2021.
